Distemper (21 page)

“I can’t. You’re the writer, not me.”

“Then tell me something about you.”

“That’ll definitely put you to sleep.”

“Try me.”

I felt him take a deep breath. I wasn’t going to prod him anymore. He was quiet for a long time. “I’ve never
seen anything like this,” he said slowly. It took me a second to realize he was talking about the case, which was the last
thing I’d expected. I just lay there and waited for him to go on. “I’ve seen a lot,” he said after a while. “Things you can’t
imagine. I once busted a guy who beat his two kids to death because they tried to change the channel during the Superbowl.
Then there was this hooker in the Combat Zone whose pimp killed her when she tried to stiff him, and as a warning to his other
girls he cut her face off. I’ll never forget that, being dragged out of bed at two o’clock in the morning and going down there,
and the coroner lifting up the plastic so we could see and these snowflakes falling on where her face used to be, mixing with
the blood and just disappearing.

“I remember during SEAL. training, we were on a long night swim, and the guy I was buddied with doubled up in pain all of
a sudden and started to drown. It was his appendix. He was a really strong swimmer, stronger than I was, but he was in so
much pain he couldn’t keep himself afloat, and I tried to help him but he was just dragging me down. I tried to talk to him,
get him to calm down, but he was terrified. And it was me or him, and I finally had to wrench myself away. I’ll never forget
the look he gave me, like I was the one who was killing him. But I didn’t know what else to do. If I tried to get him back
to shore, we were both going to drown. But if I just stayed there, he was going to die anyway. So I swam like hell to try
to get help, but I knew what we were going to find when we got back.” He paused, and I got the feeling he was living the whole
thing over again in his head.

“That was the first time I ever saw a dead body, except for my father’s funeral. If I’d known there were going to
be so many since then, I’m not sure what I would have done—maybe gone to work on Wall Street or some damn thing. It seems
like a long time ago, and since then I think I’ve seen every possible version of death. You were talking about death before,
and I guess my first reaction was that despite everything you went through last year, you have no idea of the depth and the
breadth of it—how, when you do the sort of work I’ve done, you get to feel more at home with the dead than you do with the
living.

“Both my dad and my stepfather died of cancer, so I’ve watched people die of natural causes, and honestly it’s no easier than
by accident or by violence. Any way you think about it, it seems so goddamn
senseless
. I’ve seen people who died because they worked in a convenience store, or because they welshed on a bet, or because they
cheated on their wife, or because they were on the wrong road at the wrong time, or because they were wearing the wrong color
shirt in the wrong neighborhood, or because somebody wanted their car, or because their dad got drunk and threw them against
the wall a little too hard.

“Those are the reasons people die in my world, Alex. They’re all clich?because they keep being true. Most people kill for
the same predictable reasons they always have. You’ve got your seven deadly sins and that’s pretty much it. People kill for
money, or lust, or anger, or passion, or maybe just revenge.

“But this is different. I’ve read about cases like this, where some psycho is killing just for the pure pleasure of it. And
it’s the hardest thing in the world to solve because all the things you’d normally look for, all the connections that bind
the killer and the victim together and led to the murder in the first place, none of that applies. The rules
you’ve always followed go out the window. So here I am, this hotshot from a big-city PD, and everybody’s looking at me like
I should know what I’m doing. But you know what? I have no goddamn idea. I keep studying cases like this, about the Jeffrey
Dahmers and Ted Bundys and Son of Sams of this world, and you know what’s the only common denominator? The bodies. Before
those bastards got caught, dozens of people got killed. It was almost by definition—that in order for you to catch them, they’d
have to kill so many times that it got old. They got sloppy, and they slipped up, and they finally got themselves caught.
They overlooked a witness or one of their victims got away, and it was the beginning of the end.

“And that’s what I’m afraid is going to happen here, Alex. I’m afraid that this goddamn thing has barely started. I’m afraid
that this guy has ambition, that between the letters and the murders he’s showing us that he’s bound and determined to make
a name for himself. And the thing I’m afraid of most is that I’m not good enough to stop him, and neither is the FBI, and
there’s going to be a whole morgue’s worth of bodies before this is over.”

I could tell from Cody’s voice that he wasn’t looking for an answer, didn’t expect me to buck him up with some crap about
how he was big and strong and could fight the bad guy with one hand tied behind his back. The truth was that he was probably
right, and we both knew it. His voice had gotten raspy at the end, so I handed him the water glass from the table on my side
of the bed. Then we lay in the dark together, the only sounds coming from the ceiling fan and Zeke’s snoring.

“Alex,” he said a while later. “Are you scared?”

“Do you think I should be?”

He put his arm around me to pull me next to him, and I realized we hadn’t touched the entire time he’d been talking. “No.
I told you before I’d protect you. That goes double now.”

“My hero.” I kissed him, but he didn’t kiss me back. “Are you okay?”

“I’m just thinking.”

“About what?”

“About what happened to C.A. And when it might happen again, and whose parents I’m going to have to tell next.”

“Don’t think about it. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

“Good advice. Unfortunately, I don’t feel capable of taking it right now.”

There was something new in his voice, and it sounded so odd it took me a while to place it. “Brian…” I said finally. His first
name felt strange on my lips. “Are
you
scared?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life.”

“Scared of what?”

He pulled me on top of him then, and when he answered he spoke so softly I wasn’t sure he wanted me to hear. “I’m terrified,”
he said, “of letting somebody else drown.”

A
FTER
C.A.’
S DEATH, THE POWERS THAT BE AT
B
ENSON
finally started acting like they gave a damn. Now, the reason for this wasn’t quite what you’d think. Sure, they were upset
that they’d lost one of their own; C.A., unlike Patricia Marx or Jane Doe, was a bona fide, matriculated Benson student, and
that made her death more than a matter of institutional hand-wringing. It meant that the university was going to have to deal
with the inevitable parental hysteria, and a certain number of students were bound to do what Marci did—flee.

But as far as Benson was concerned, it could get a lot worse: If another student got offed, the school might get a reputation
as Murder U. When people think of the University of Florida at Gainesville they still think of dead coeds, and that sort of
thing isn’t good for the endowment. And what was worse, it was happening during what was traditionally Benson’s finest hour—that
lyrical interlude between graduation and reunions, when the campus is at its prettiest (thanks to all the square yardage of
bluegrass
they truck in from Kentucky) and there are very few students around to ruin it all. The rabble-rousing seniors—including most
of the Benson Animal Anarchists—were safely graduated, and it would be months before the new crop got sufficiently organized
to cause trouble.

In two short days, five thousand alumni would descend on campus, decked out in Benson togs from stem to stern, and the university
would wine and dine them for seventy-two hours straight. They’d row on the lake and sing songs and play rugby against undergrads
paid to let them win, and when it was all over they’d be so overcome with emotion they’d whip out their checkbooks and say
here, take it all
.

It was a sacred process with a long and illustrious history. The university had no intention of letting some serial murderer
mess everything up, particularly since it was highly unlikely that he was an alumnus.

So it was no surprise when Benson’s president, an ill-tempered old Brit who stands five-five in his Bruno Maglis, called Chief
Hill up to his office for a royal audience. I only heard about it third-hand, of course—from a very amused Detective Cody,
who was new to the vicissitudes of town-gown sniping—but apparently the president fed the chief lots of Walker’s shortbread
before informing him that if anybody died before the last teary-eyed alum blew out of town, Hill’s son Wilfred Jr. (who was
enrolling next fall on a baseball scholarship) was going to fail every course he took.

The politics of town and gown are complex, but as far as most of Gabriel is concerned, Benson is only truly benign three weeks
a year: between Christmas and New
Year’s, when the entire university shuts down for vacation; between graduation and reunion, when the students are gone and
everyone on campus is madly cleaning up for the alums; and between the end of summer session and the start of fall semester,
when the maintenance men spend the week hiding all the nice flowers before the students come back. The latter is the most
bittersweet of all, because although there’s a lot of good parking and the restaurants have no lines, we all know that within
a matter of days we’ll be descended upon by hordes of clueless newcomers, asking directions in Long Island accents and then
driving the wrong way down one-way streets anyway.

Townies like me usually treasure every one of those glorious days of peace and tranquillity. But this time, I would’ve just
as soon been crowded elbow to elbow with topless sorority girls. There was something eerie about the quiet, like the town
had curled itself up into a ball and rolled into the lake. Or maybe it felt like everybody was holding their breath, girding
themselves for another girl to die, and although nobody wanted it to happen the waiting was pretty awful in and of itself.
There had been no more letters to the newspaper, and no phone calls other than the one I got the day C.A.’s body was found.
I couldn’t understand why the letters had dried up, but I hoped to hell it wasn’t because we’d had our chance to placate the
killer by printing his crap, and we’d blown it.

It didn’t help that the outside media was finally starting to sniff around our little burgh. Call me a hypocrite, but as far
as I was concerned this sucked any way you looked at it. People were used to locals like me chasing them around with a notebook,
but camera crews from the
network affiliates made everybody feel like they were living in the middle of a war zone. Plus—and I swear this isn’t just
the usual print-versus-TV griping—half the coverage was just downright
wrong
. One station somehow calculated the body count at five. Another one mixed up the victims and said Patricia Marx was the vet
student and C.A. worked at the Gap (which, considering her notorious lack of fashion sense, made Emma laugh and cry at the
same time). The CBS guys from Binghamton managed to snag “an exclusive interview with one of Cathy Ann Keillor’s roommates.”
This was quite a mystery to us since we were fairly sure that whoever this person was, she didn’t live with us.

As if that weren’t bad enough, one of the tabloid crews put two and two together and, recalling my own personal brush with
eternity, chased me around for three days trying to do a piece entitled “Gabriel: City of Death.” I thought about snipping
our cable wire as an act of civil disobedience, but Emma pointed out that we wouldn’t be able to watch
Two Fat Ladies
on the Food Network, and that was the end of that.

Back at the
Monitor
, the mood was pretty grim. Bill had gone apoplectic when he found out Gordon was in town covering the story for the
Times
, to the point that he finally lost control of his beloved tennis ball and broke a window. The sudden preponderance of reporters
made the pickings slimmer for everybody, and before long all the usual sources dried up, even for the locals. People were
just sick to death of answering questions, and I can’t say I blamed them.

Fortunately for Wilfred Jr.’s academic future, reunion weekend came and went without another corpse. It did,
however, offer me the pleasure of writing the usual alumni drivel, cranked out in yet another effort to convince the Benson
community to buy more than twenty lousy papers a day. The university flacks were just as happy to have something other than
a dead vet student on our front page, and they went out of their way to come up with cutesy little stories for me. Thus, I
spent part of one Saturday listening to old white guys reminisce about their glory days (for a piece on an oral history project
the Benson archive was running) and the rest of it watching slightly younger white guys sing Judy Garland songs in drag (for
a story about the annual alumni comedy show, which you apparently have to be very, very drunk to appreciate).